Why? Brother Aldo looked hard at her. Have you forgotten one who promised you safety long ago and passed into the enemy’s hands to save you?
“How could I?” She broke into speech in her agitation. “You mean Jone, don’t you, Father? Is he alive? Did you save him too?”
Yes, I meant Brother Jone, child. And I did not mean to sound so reproving. And although l am indeed vastly older than any of you and probably all of you at once, call me “brother.” The fur-man here, and he indicated Gorm, knows me as an “Old One. “So I am. But being a father implies responsibility of a kind I don’t have or want. A father directs: I guide, at best.
“Per” means “father” in an old language. Hiero sent in somewhat truculent meaning.
I know, and I think your church makes a mistake using it. But why do I wander so? I must be getting dimwitted. Let us sit and exchange thoughts.
When they were comfortably arranged on the fast-drying sand, Hiero asked the next question.
Are we still in danger, immediate, I mean?
No, or I should not sit here. My brother out yonder will wait if I choose. He nodded his head toward the still water. As they looked, first one battered piece of wood broke the quiet ripples and then another. As they watched, a growing collection of flotsam continued to surface.
How do you control that thing? I never dreamed a creature that size existed, or that if it did, that a level of intelligence that low could be mastered.
You have a few things to learn, then, Per Desteen, was the almost dry answer. It would take a lot of training to teach you, and I don’t mean to disparage your own powers. But it happens, in this case, to be neural rather than cerebral. And it’s not always reliable. But let’s say that control of our younger brothers and communication with them are and always have been specialties of ours. We are continually seeking contact with any life form we can reach. Brother Aldo wrapped his arms around his knees before continuing.
Look—time is important. Before we go further, I need information. This whole part of the world is in a turmoil, mental and physical, and all because of you four. Now, then, Per Desteen, you lead this party. Suppose you tell me briefly what you are doing here and the recent history of this group. I’ll try not to interrupt.
Hiero considered briefly. The question was, how much could he trust the Elevener? He had always liked the men of the order he had met, but this was no quiet teacher or animal doctor, but a most formidable old man, whose mental powers were of an order which made the Metz awe-struck. While he ruminated, Brother Aldo waited patiently.
At length Hiero looked up and met the dark, wise eyes.
“I don’t know what the Abbey Council would say, Brother,” he said aloud in Metz, without thinking, “but I think you are honorable and trustworthy. I will keep one secret, the reason for my mission, if you please. The rest is yours.”
I appreciate the compliment, was the mental answer. Use your mind, please, for it saves time. Also, we must all listen and understand. Do not worry about a mind search by the enemy. That which lairs in the Dead City was withdrawn, both itself and its creatures, the frog Leemutes, as you call them. Nothing else is left to hinder us, at least nearby.
So, as the morning climbed into the sky, Hiero related the history of his journey with Klootz, adding the others as they had joined him. He started at the Abbey with old Abbot Demero and hid nothing, save exactly what it was he had been sent to find. On and on went the story, through the Taig forest, the Palood, the shores of the Inland Sea, the Dead Isle of Manoon, and at last, the coming to the drowned city.
When he was through, Hiero looked at the sun and was amazed that he had only taken about a quarter of an hour, for it had hardly moved.
Brother Aldo sat quietly and stared at the sand. At last, he looked up at all of them. Well, a good tale. You should all be proud of yourselves. Now I have a tale, less exciting and more historic. But one you should know, indeed, must know, before we go further. And it starts, not two months ago, or even two years, but five thousand and more, in the ancient past, before the coming of The Death.
9. THE SEA ROVERS
You look about you, children, came the message from brother Aldo’s mind, and you see, in the world, green forest and glade, blue sea and river, yellow prairie and marsh. In them today lurk evil things, yet they also hold uncounted sorts of beauty and wonder. The singing birds, the breathing plants, the shy animals, the savage hunters, all have a place. Alone and unhindered, they change slowly, one kind yielding place to another over the centuries and millennia. This is the ordered course of nature, the plan as the Creator designed it.
But before The Death, things most rapidly were changing, yes, and for the worst. The entire world, as well as simply here in what was once called North America, was dying. It was being choked, strangled in artificially made filth and its own sickly refuse. He pointed a lean hand at the ring of ruined towers glaring across the lagoon.
See there! The whole planet, the good round Earth, was being covered by those things! Giant buildings blotted out the sun. The ground was overlain with stone and other hard substances, so that it could not breathe. Vast man-made structures were built everywhere, to make yet more vast structures, and the smoke and stench of the engines and devices used fouled the worlds air in great clouds of poison. He paused for a moment and looked sad.
This was not all. The Earth itself trembled. Monstrous vessels, to which that Unclean ship of yesterday would be a skiff, fouled the very seas. Overhead, the air vibrated with the rush of great flying machines, whose speed alone, by its vibration, could shatter stone. Along countless stone roads, myriad wheeled machines, carrying ever more goods and people, charged madly along, their poisonous wastes still further fouling the already wearied air.
And then, there were the world’s people. The warring, breeding, struggling, senseless people! The peoples of the planet could not, or rather would not, be brought to reason. Not only did they refuse to see how they were killing the life of the world, they could not even see how they were killing themselves! For they bred. Despite vast poverty, great ignorance, disease, and endless wars, humans were still tough! Every year there were more. And more and more, until the cataclysm was inevitable. Wise men warned them, scientists and humanists pleaded with them. God and nature are one, they said, and hence neither is mocked and defied with impunity.
A few listened, indeed more than a few. But not enough. Certain leaders of religion, men ignorant of any science and any learning but their own outdated hagiography, refused to heed. Other men, who controlled the world’s wealth and soldiery, wished more power. They wished yet more men both to make and to consume what they sold and still more men to wage the wars which they fomented in the name of one political creed or another. Races warred against races of other colors, white against yellow, black against white.
The end was quite inevitable. It had to come! Men of science who had studied many species of mammals in laboratories of the ancient world had long predicted it. When overpopulation and crowding, dirt and noise, reach a peak, madness remorselessly follows. We today call that madness The Death. Across the whole world, by land, water, and air, total war raged unchecked. Radiation, hideous chemical weapons, and artificially spawned disease slew most of the humans then in existence, and much of the remaining animal life, too.